A Practical Gospel

He was a Catholic draft resister opposed to the Vietnam War. She used to be a nun.

Today, following the teachings of Jesus, Jeff Dietrich and his wife, Catherine Morris, feed, clothe and house the poor and homeless from a Victorian home in Boyle Heights and the soup kitchen they help run downtown.

Dietrich and Morris, along with others in the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, have chosen to live lives of voluntary poverty among those they serve.

“This is our way of living out the Gospel,” said Dietrich, 51, a founding member of the local Catholic Worker community.

As a lay Catholic group, the Catholic Workers have no official relationship with the archdiocese, although donations come from local churches. The group sometimes is at odds with church policy, such as its opposition to the new cathedral planned for downtown.

Dietrich and Morris, 63, have lived in the Catholic Worker community longer than any other members--Dietrich since 1970 and Morris since 1972.

They see an increasingly grim outlook for the needy, even as the economy rebounds.

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Dietrich spoke about new regulations restricting welfare, anti-panhandling laws, the increasing difficulties some churches are encountering in feeding and sheltering the homeless. He sees the new Twin Towers jail as a symbol of the city’s response to poverty.

“We’ve already seen the police raids intensify, they’re cleaning up the streets, taking shopping carts, we’ve seen more people arrested for panhandling. People are feeling a little more harassed.”

Dietrich grew up in Fullerton’s Sunny Hills neighborhood, an Orange County suburb, where he attended Catholic high school and went on to receive an English degree from Cal State Fullerton. Through the antiwar movement, he came to the Catholic Worker group.

“The war in Vietnam was a major turning point in my life. I decided, as did a lot of other people, to refuse induction into the military and found the Catholic Worker group was supportive of that stand . . . it enabled me to ground my radical values within a 2,000-year-old system,” he said.

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Morris came to Catholic Worker by a different path.

A Pasadena native, she went to UCLA and became a teacher. While teaching in Brentwood, she acted upon a “long-deferred decision” and became a Sister of the Holy Child Jesus at age 26.

After years “working with the rich,” she reached another milestone as principal of a private Pasadena school. One day, she was challenged by a young man about “What I did, why we lived in a mansion.”

His questions led to her own. She began volunteering at the Catholic Worker kitchen.

“I was quite taken with the whole milieu, not just the work. It seemed to be living out my vow of poverty,” she said.

Morris also took to the movement’s social activism, working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union, at the Santa Marta Hospital well-baby clinic in East Los Angeles and tutoring adults at the county hospital.

After 14 years as a nun, she quit to join the Catholic Worker community. “I didn’t leave the order as a disgruntled nun. I felt I was called to a different lifestyle. I found this to be the lifestyle that best represents the Gospel life I chose to lead in the first place.”

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When she and Dietrich decided to marry, “we also decided to make this our life,” Morris said.

The movement they have dedicated their lives to was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day, a radical social activist, journalist and convert to Catholicism, and Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and former Christian brother.

They believed that to care for the poor, worship, work for social justice and live simply was to follow, in the purest sense, the teachings of Christ.

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Catholic Worker members live in a 13-bedroom home in Boyle Heights and commute to Skid Row three days a week to run a “hospitality kitchen.” They also operate a small hospice.

There are 12 core members and others who help out. Their ranks include a 19-year-old New Yorker, a 70-year-old woman from Hawaii and a sixtysomething couple who left their 40-acre ranch in Bishop to join.

It’s a busy life, even on days when they are not running the kitchen. A typical day begins with breakfast at 7 a.m., and by 7:15 a.m., they are off to serve coffee and doughnuts at a welfare office. Following that, they may travel to a government building to stage protests about treatment of immigrants.

By 10 a.m. they are back home for prayer, Bible study and lunch, followed by a house meeting. At night, they often have a prayer service and potluck dinner. Later, some members may go out to serve soup on the street until 9 p.m.

At the kitchen at Sixth and Gladys streets, a well-organized, if harried, group of volunteers prepares and serves 1,000 to 2,000 meals.

After the original building was destroyed in a 1987 earthquake, the group built a smaller kitchen covered in bright murals and created an outdoor dining area with trees, flowers, a fountain and a tiny aviary. There also is a small dental and health clinic on the property.

The kitchen is an oasis of quiet order in a part of the city marked by industrial blight, din and chaos.

Volunteers serve meals Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until noon.

Most food is donated, including all the meat and vegetables, both rare commodities for people here. The community buys basics such as beans and rice and operates on a budget of about $100,000 a year, all from donations, Dietrich said.

Bob Schneider, 66, has been helping every Tuesday and Thursday since he retired from teaching high school biology six years ago.

“I wanted to do something like this when I retired; I thought it would be romantic,” he said, adding that it’s hard work.

In the line outside, the smallest slight can quickly escalate into confrontation. Volunteers learn how to quickly calm volatile guests.

“Out of the thousands that come here, there are people who are mentally disturbed and angry. . . . People come from an extremely broken environment,” Dietrich said.

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Signs of the group’s religious underpinnings are few. In one corner stands a “Skid Row Cross.” Inside the kitchen hangs the Prayer of St. Francis, which implores God to “make me a channel of Thy peace.” One recent diner said he did not know his meal of salad, bread and lentils with ham came from a lay Catholic group.

“We don’t preach to people, we feel like people can pick up that we’re trying to do the things that Christ talked about rather than just talking about them,” Dietrich said.

Morris and Dietrich acknowledge their shortcomings and the difficulty of their work. But they see good reason to continue.

“There is a sense of satisfaction of doing something meaningful,” Dietrich said. “When I look at the alternatives, they don’t look all that great to me. . . . I could be selling cars in the Valley. . . .

“I think I was blessed by grace. So many of my friends in the antiwar movement are now pretty conservative, live a normal lifestyle in the suburbs. . . . I was fortunate to fall into this situation.”